


Castiel is Saved

by isthemachinesinging



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Purgatory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-29
Updated: 2013-03-29
Packaged: 2017-12-06 20:27:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/739817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/isthemachinesinging/pseuds/isthemachinesinging
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Castiel’s last days in Purgatory, wherein he is rescued not by an incursion of angels, but by a surreal tiger man.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Castiel is Saved

_Dean Winchester is saved._

He kneels there for a long time, after Dean is gone and all light has faded, and this is what rings in his mind. He remembers shouting it to all of Heaven, to every angel, when he had finally pulled that struggling soul from the Pit. He shouts it again now, though there are none to hear but monsters. He does not care about monsters, and he does not care about Leviathan, and so he shouts it with all the strength of his vessel and with every dimension of his own being. The sound of it is not the full sound of this body at its strength, nor the rolling multicolored ring of his own true voice, but a broken and shuddering cry.

 

“Dean Winchester is saved.”

He cries out to all of Purgatory, to every monster, to Leviathan. The human is gone, and he knows it’s really him they want, him they are hunting, and he’s calling them to him. And why not? Dean Winchester is saved, that is what matters—but he was saved by another. By a vampire. By one of the monsters of this place. A vampire with a toothy grin and promises of repentance. He could not save Dean; all he could do was run and draw the hungry Leviathan away, but he did not save Dean. He had not saved Dean. And so he kneels there, waiting, waiting for the hunt to begin again, and soon he senses them approaching.

They laugh as they run at him, heads unhinging into toothy jaws. They have allowed him only his bitter cry, a moment’s sorrow and relief. And he runs. He still runs. It’s not penance if he dies too soon; no atonement if they tear into him with his sins still unpaid. He runs, and he runs. He does not sleep, and there are many of them. They trade off, sometimes, driving him first this way, then the other. Sometimes they drive him into the water, spreading themselves around him like ink. But they never touch him. They are playing with him, amused.

“Little angel, little angel, give us another ride,” they sing to him, surrounding him. They let him break free; let him run away, only to follow him and start again. He’s beginning to understand. It’s a game; good entertainment. They are the hungry ones, but they are also angry, angry at the one who pulled them into the universe and then sent them back here again, into their starving prison. They want to punish him for showing them paradise, for making them aware of their hunger again. And in this prison, their home, they can play with him forever.

He stops, sometimes, at night. Habit. It’s very quiet now, and the first nights he listens, not with his vessel’s ears, but to the vibration of his grace. It is Dean’s prayer he is listening for, and though he knows there will be nothing to hear anymore—Dean Winchester is saved—still he listens. He is grateful that there is no more prayer here— _Cas, where are you? You okay, man? I’m lookin’ for you._   _If you hear me, come find me_. And yet he sits in silence and is filled with sorrow. It wells up in his vessel, dims his grace. He will never know if Dean had forgiven him—he had started to, perhaps, but a beginning is not completion and without Dean’s forgiveness he will never be fully shriven. But it is too late, and it is better this way.

They still come to him at night, and this is the worst. They keep their jaws small and their teeth blunt but their bite is sharp and tearing. They rip him open with words, taunting and mocking. They know all of it, of course—they’ve overpowered him, wrapped their oily essence around his grace and pushed it down, down, flooding his vessel with their own ravening beings. They had touched and rifled through his grace, sorting through eons in an instant, watching the rise of humanity through his awareness with awakening hunger. And they had found Dean there, of course, the burn of that soul still seared into the core of his grace from the hour he had pulled him from Hell. Dean, the first soul he had ever touched. It’s Dean they use against him, most of the time.

“He left you here, little angel. Left you here to fester and rot and feed us.”

“He hates you. He will always hate you. He will never forgive you.”

“You’re nothing to him but a broken tool. Broken, useless little angel.”

And sometimes they whisper, hissing, the name of every angel he destroyed. It is an endless litany, name after name after name, drawn from his own memory. Each name cuts into him, tears at his grace. One night, he can take no more, and he runs to them this time, longing for their shark-jaws to unhinge, to rip his vessel open, to desecrate and transform his grace until it dissipates, until he is gone. But this is their territory and their game, and they always pull away, laughing, leaving him silent and alone.

He continues like this for uncounted days and nights. Sometimes, there are other creatures, drawn by the blood-scent of his human vessel. He smites them carelessly. He sees the vampire in each one, the one who saved Dean, and is both horrified and delighted to feel a cold twist of pleasure in their burning.  _Dean Winchester is saved_ , he tells each monster, and now he adds:  _And it was not by me_. They snarl at him. Unlike the Leviathan, there is no humor in their attacks. There is only their rage, cold and bloodless.

He becomes aware of a new presence slowly, first as a new vibration in his grace, a sound that was not quite sound and a light that was not quite light. He feels them and he is suddenly very afraid, though he does not know why. He reaches out with his grace and feels the humming, swirling energy of many angels. It seems to him that they must be here to execute him, and he wants to go to them, to fly from his vessels and into the arms of annihilation, of deserved oblivion. Yet he fears them too, and he thinks perhaps he does not truly want to die. Perhaps it is the human soul that still sleeps in this body, rebelling at the thought. He runs from them instead.

He runs, and by night he watches them. The Leviathan have turned to them, and his nights are quiet now. The angels flare and glow in the distance like a multihued forest fire. Not envesseled, then; they are here in their true forms. Sometimes he feels the shriek of death, and he knows that Leviathan are not playing with them as they have him. He tries to force his vessel to move to them, to give up, as every new death pierces his grace. They are here for him, he knows, and therefore they are dying for him. More names to add to his unending list, the blood price of his arrogance.

It’s on one of these nights, as he contemplates shedding his vessel, that he sees the tiger. He does not sense it before he sees it; its energy does not bend his grace. He simply blinks, and it is standing before him. It shifts quickly between tiger and man, tiger and man, tigerandman, and sometimes he is looking into soft human eyes, and sometimes the hard and wild eyes of a cat. He closes his vessel’s eyes, and sees it flaring into the tree tops, the tiger’s mouth open in a roar, the man laughing. He opens his eyes again. To his vessel’s sight, the tiger-man is small, compacted into a human-size form. It is hiding the true shape and form of its grace from him, wearing the tiger-form like a mask.

There is only one living angel who could do such a thing. There is only one who would. Metatron, he thinks, and he reaches out to touch the other’s grace. But his tentative exploration meets not the greeting vibration of another angel, but only a shimmering soft mist like a mirage. His grace flickers and slides off of it, smooth and dark as glass. The tiger-man shakes its head at him, the tiger snarling, the man grinning.

“Little brother. I’ve come to take you home.”

 _I’ve come to take you home._ And that chills Castiel down to his borrowed bones; makes his grace shiver and tremble and try to contract on itself. If home is Heaven, he does not want to return. He does not want to see what it has become, how he has torn and twisted and reshaped it. The Leviathan’s endless and mocking repetition of names burns in him, and he thinks of all the celestial dimensions now empty of their energy, their grace. And if home is Earth…He remembers what he did, every detail, the righteous power of his Godhood. The shame of it. He was  _making it right_ , casting down the cruel and the hypocritical and the greedy. Slaughtering them all, and not until it was over did he wonder why his Father had not done the same; to think that there was a reason he had not cleaned the world into a perfect shiny blankness. He is aware that he is running, but he does not want to go home. He cannot go home. He will refuse, just as he refused Dean, and he will stay. There is, after all, penance to be paid.

“No,” he tells the tiger-man. He waits for the flash of grace, the angel’s rage, and tenses his vessel’s body to run. He is running from an army of angels already; he can run from another. But there is no flame of anger, no lashing of rage, from the tiger-man. He laughs again, and at last he unveils his grace, flaring in a thousand hues through the darkness of Purgatory. Castiel is unceremoniously wrapped in that grace, pulled along. He is tiny, compacted into his vessel’s human body, and he is huge, the bright light of his grace twined into the other’s, caught and held and cradled. The tiger face grins at him, all teeth and snarl and wildness. He swirls and whirls, enfolding Castiel, and sometimes he is tiger-shaped, sometimes he is human-shaped, and through it all his grace swirls and pulses.

“I did not  _ask_ , little brother.” He laughs, and the tiger growls in his laughter—a trilling vibration, rippling his grace. He pushes his face close, and with his vessel’s eyes Castiel sees tiger, feels the hot wild breath on his face. With his grace he feels Eternity, the endless infinite detail of creation, held within the other’s fiery form. There is no other angel like this one, the mad archangel who inscribed the very Word of Creation. “We like you, little brother. You’ve always been a most peculiar and wonderful thing. And you deserve to be saved.”

And before he can respond, pull away, scream  _I_   _don’t, I deserve to die for what I did, leave me,_ he is pulled apart. Every cell of his vessel’s body is pulled apart and reformed in an instant, pain devouring him; the body’s sleeping soul suddenly awake and screaming. His grace is inverted, and suddenly he is a void, dark and silent, only to snap back into familiar brightness. He contracts smaller than small, falling in on himself, and then he is expanded, filling all of Purgatory, feeling himself push against its bounds.

“You won’t remember this. But you will find me again,” the tiger-man says as the light fades, twisting and reforming.  _Home_ , he thinks, and he does not know which home he fears most. The darkness of Purgatory blinks out, and in the next moment, he is standing on the side of a road. Distantly he hears the tiger-man’s last words, a roaring, ringing, shattering cry:  _Castiel is saved._


End file.
